Electronic devices, including portable communication devices, have gained widespread use. Portable communication devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop computers, tablet computers, and so forth.
Many of these portable communication devices have both longer-range and short-range communications capabilities. Bluetooth™-based communications represent a particularly ubiquitous example of a short-range wireless communications capability as regards a wide variety of consumer-based portable communication devices. A wide variety of electronic devices are able to link and communicate using the Bluetooth™ standard.
For example, modern automobiles often have an in-vehicle media center that supports a wide variety of vehicle-specific capabilities (such as providing information to the driver regarding vehicular operating parameters, trip details, location-based information) in addition to supporting an in-vehicle sound system (to support, for example, the playback of pre-recorded music and/or to audibilize received commercial radio station broadcasts). Increasingly, such media centers are also provided with a Bluetooth™ transceiver to permit the media center to wirelessly connect to, for example, a smartphone and thereby extend some of the functionality of the smartphone to the media center.
For some application purposes the foregoing works seamlessly. For example, the Bluetooth™ standard readily permits the smartphone to stream music content to such a media center and for the latter to render that music audible via the media center's acoustic resources.
Unfortunately, short-range communications standards like Bluetooth™ do not necessarily support, in a straight-forward and native manner, all functionality that a user might desire. As one example in these regards, Bluetooth™ is not able to natively forward, in a service-segregated manner, the various messages that correspond to the many (and growing number of) social-media services that are now available. As a more specific example, a Twitter™ Tweet™ cannot be natively sent as a “Tweet” via Bluetooth™. While Bluetooth™ will readily accommodate email as “email,” the Bluetooth™ standard is not designed to preserve the categorical sense of a Tweet™ as corresponding to the Twitter™ social-media service.